Weekend Shorts.

Still running through November 9 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is the series "Days of Being Wild: The Screen Life of Leslie Cheung." Many of us, of course, won't be able to make it. But the site really is worth a browse, and hopefully, the accompanying book, with contributions from Tsui Hark, Wong Kar-wai, Chen Kaige, Stanley Kwan, Christopher Doyle, Adrian Martin and more, will be available to those of us here up over at some point. What is available is Philippa Hawker's wonderful piece on Leslie Cheung in The Age. Via Movie City News, where Leonard Klady is currently reflecting on the almost complete lack of an alternative to studio fare.

A pleasant surprise via Anime News Network: "Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers will be released theatrically in the United States and Japan simultaneously on December 29th, 2003."

I'll disagree with John Laughland's take on Kill Bill, but see if this paragraph in the Spectator doesn't make you stop and think a moment:

Fictional violence on television may not incite people to commit acts of real violence themselves, but the failure to depict real violence certainly raises the public's tolerance threshold for it. Numerous are the newspaper columnists who blithely rail against violence on TV, while at the same time egging on the government to unleash real violence in real wars. Yet if it is cool to have a fun evening out watching a fictional woman murder a mother in front of her child, why is it bad taste to show images of real mothers who have been killed in front of their children by the bombs launched by Tony Blair? And why are the instruments of censorship deployed against the latter sort of image, but never against the former?

The quick answer to the second half of his last question is fairly obvious: Precisely because it is fictional; it is "expression" or "speech" which can and must remain "free." The good, meaty challenge here is that the same ought to apply to the first half of Laughland's question.

"A succession of women film-makers have entered the formerly male territory of sado-masochism and screen violence. Is this a sign that women have finally thrown off their shackles?" asks Cherry Potter in the Guardian. Her answer, by the way, is no.

"Cruelty is a basic element in comedy. What appears to be sane is really insane, and if you can make that poignant enough they love it." The Guardian runs an excerpt from Richard Meryman's 1966 interview with Charlie Chaplin, which'll run in full in Jeffrey Vance's forthcoming Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema. Also: Geoffrey Macnab on James Mason. And then, there's David Mamet. I'm not sure what he was sniffing when he wrote this, but while I think there's something to his conclusion, he's certainly chosen an odd route to get there: "As the canny politician has realised the error of the ballot box, the wise showman will see that it is only the existence of the theatrical release that contains risk.... I will conclude in predicting the disappearance of the motion picture theatre within the next 15 to 20 years."

"Yaphet Kotto, the First African-American in Space." Marjorie Baumgarten talks to him. Also in the Austin Chronicle: Another horror list.

Speaking of which. Metaphilm has a couple of links to some pretty interesting-looking Exorcist pieces, but only one of those links seems to be working at the moment: Sean Collins on the film that "begins in Iraq, an appropriate instance of synchronicity given that The Exorcist, the film widely considered to be the greatest horror film of all time, is actually a war movie."

In the LA Weekly: Monroe, Brando, Dean, Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr., John Wayne, Louis Armstrong. Greg Goldin on the images photographer Phil Stern has "managed to slide into the popular consciousness." And Nikki Finke on the politicking and jostling that finally led to the hiring of a new Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times and a television critic for the Los Angeles Times.

So... by openly criticizing the MPAA, the New York Film Critics Circle has only reconfirmed that there is "no longer a separation between movie journalism and the film industry"? Armond White's tirade in the New York Press is a mind-bender, but he's got a good point there about Miramax. He's got a couple of good points, actually. Critics are walking egos eager to be inflated. The Academy does often make lousy choices. Daring little films do go unrecognized. Does all this add up? Not when it comes to the principle of the screeners debate, no. Awards, and not just the Oscars, do matter and not everyone in on the process lives in New York or LA, where they can catch worthy candidates that go undistributed between the coasts. And yet the technology to work around that problem exists; Valenti wants to stomp it out. He'll win a battle here and there, but there's little doubt he'll lose the war.

In the Voice: Chuck Stephens on Hong Sang-Soo, the "brightest filmmaker to emerge from South Korean cinema's recent boom years"; Howard Feinstein is hardly surprised to find the Marrakech International Film Festival dominated by political debate; Musto drops names with gusto.

"Hellboy is going to come out nice, because it's going to be a '2.5 DVD.' We're going to have two big ones and one tiny one. There will be a CD-ROM with a lot of goodies." Jason Bovberg interviews Guillermo del Toro for DVD Talk.

"Can I keep up with Revolutions if I haven't seen the first two films? Forget it." A brief FAQ from Scott Bowles in USA Today.

Mercy Bell talks to DJ Perry about Wicked Spring, an indie Civil War movie he's produced and starred in.

TV: Very nice turn of a phrase from Cynthia Moothart in In These Times. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart "plays straight man to the day's events." For Kera Bolonik, writing in The Nation, Will & Grace "has become the craftiest, if not the most radical, show in the history of network television."

"Apple's vision, in any case, was and is spot on. I wonder how much closer to reality it will be in another fifteen years." That's Jon Udell contextualizing a phenomenal online viewing tip sent along by a friend who may or may not wish to be identified: Apple's 1988 Knowledge Navigator concept video.

Posted by dwhudson at November 1, 2003 2:11 PM